The Chronicle of Higher Education

Some of my former-students-turned-academics like to explain things to me. Whether we’re talking about the dangers of political apathy or the health benefits of exercise, I am treated to mini-lectures that provide me with background information, context, and a broad overview that can take upwards of 30 minutes.

Some of these explainers have had a few years of college-level teaching as TAs while others have managed to snag their first jobs as lecturers and adjuncts. They have developed habits of mind that run toward educating. I’m sure they do a good job for their students and I try not to mind when they practice on me, even when they forget that I’ve been around a few blocks myself. In the right mood, I can even find the behavior endearing.

What worries me is how this tendency can become a tic for some academics — and an annoying one at that.

Resisting the Urge to Profess

Some of my former-students-turned-academics like to explain things to me. Whether we’re talking about the dangers of political apathy or the health benefits of exercise, I am treated to mini-lectures... Read More

Scholars Talk Writing: Laura Kipnis

Readers of The Chronicle will be plenty familiar with “Troublemaker” Laura Kipnis, a professor of film at Northwestern University. In February of 2015, she wrote an essay about “sexual paranoia” on campuses. A group of Northwestern…

Just as interesting as Jordan Schneider’s fine essay, “Why I Curse in the Classroom,”were the responses — the horrified reactions of those who believe the sky will fall if a professor uses a four-letter word in a college classroom.

Most amusing were the folks who claimed that potty mouths curse because we are bereft of linguistic skill. Some of the best writers I know speak and write using many of the Anglo-Saxon words that George Carlin said you can’t say on television. Frankly, people who curse a lot offend me far less than folks who don’t know the difference between “reign” and “rein” — and who can’t rein in their own strung-out sentences.

Both the essay and the intemperate comments were useful, though, as I thought about my own language in the classroom. I realized that, for better or worse, my voice is always recognizably my own — both in person and on the page. It’s taken me a long time to get to that point.

About a zillion years ago, I was an editorial assistant at Oxford University Press, apprenticed to Sheldon Meyer, one of the great editors of American history. Sheldon had exquisite taste and the ability to keep his authors happy and productive by dint of his supportive intelligence, patience, and many-martini lunches. He was responsible for a series of trade books on the history of the United States, to be edited by C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter. The three of them came up with an all-star line up of scholars to write each volume, and contracts were issued.

When I got to the press, in 1984, only one of the books had been published, The Glorious Cause, by Robert Middlekauff. The series, as is often the case with ambitious publishing projects, had gotten stalled. So when James M. McPherson submitted a gargantuan manuscript for what would become Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988), everyone was excited. I got to do extremely important work on the proj­ect: cheerily typing up the front matter, numbering the pages by hand, making copies, and having endless discussions about maps.

Readers of The Chronicle will be plenty familiar with “Troublemaker” Laura Kipnis, a professor of film at Northwestern University. In February of 2015, she wrote an essay about “sexual paranoia” on campuses. A group of Northwestern students protested the piece, and then two graduate students brought a Title IX case against her, arguing that her essay had a “chilling effect.” No one could do a better job than Kipnis herself in describing the whole affair: “Being protested had its gratifying side — I soon realized that my writer friends were jealous that I’d gotten marched on and they hadn’t.” She’s working on a book, titled Higher Education/Stupid Sex, based on her recent experiences.

But many of us were reading Kipnis long before this series of unfortunate events. She’s been writing interesting, provocative, funny, smart, and graceful essays for a long time. I first became aware of her when she published Against Love: A Polemic.Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called the book a “ragingly witty yet contemplative look at the discontents of domestic and erotic relationships” where Kipnis “combines portions of the slashing sexual contrarianism of Mailer, the scathing antidomestic wit of early Roseanne Barr and the coolly analytical aesthetics of early Sontag.” Who could resist that kind of mash-up?

Not long after I graduated from college as an English major with a jones for philosophy and a love of Iris Murdoch, Milan Kundera, and Robertson Davies, I found a novel called The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein. When I opened it and read the first line, I was hooked: “I’m often asked what it’s like to be married to a genius.” The novel not only was funny and smart, but also tackled Big Ideas. Here was an author I wanted to be friends with. No, I wanted to be her. Three decades later, I got to tell Rebecca Goldstein about my girl crush and ask her some questions about writing.

Not long after she had splashed onto the scene with the publication of her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, and followed that up with an essay in The New York Times claiming that Madonna was the future of feminism, I went to see Camille Paglia speak on a panel about political correctness at New York University. My recollection is of being frisked by armed guards before being allowed to enter the auditorium, but it’s more likely we just had to empty our pockets and go through a metal detector.

Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and, by courtesy, of history at Stanford University, emailed himself into my life when he sent me a brief request: “No beating around the bush: Do you do any freelance consulting — i.e., looking over a book proposal and spanking me as necessary?”

I am always shocked when academics complain about being copy-edited, as if the marks that come back on their manuscripts were pesky flies that should be shooed away. My experience of receiving editing, both substantively and line by line, is that it’s like love. Good copy editors see me not just for who I am but for who I want to be, and they help me get there. They point out what I do well, but they also notice my tics and bad habits and try to break me of them.

Every time I walk to and from my office I pass a big poster for the Writers’ Center at my university. The poster features an oversize photo of Ernest Hemingway, and next to it, in proud and arrogant type, the following assertion: “Everyone is a writer. Period.”

Iused to cry at weddings. Mostly now I find myself cringing. I miss the days when a tottering officiant spouted a bunch of canned pablum and all the bride and groom had to do was say, “I do.” Instead we get carefully planned ceremonies in which the couple have composed lengthy vows that can sound like an embarrassing litany of problems in the relationship.